The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is a signaling mechanism that is between a host and a router and used for an IP multicast in a user network segment, in which the multicast group member management function is implemented by exchanging an IGMP message between the host and the router.
Generally, a switch is configured between the router and the host. After a last-hop router forwards a multicast packet to the user network segment, the switch continues to perform multicast distribution. Currently, the IGMP snooping function is enabled on the switch to snoop an IGMP message exchanged between the router and a multicast group member host, so as to learn ports of the switch that are connected to the multicast group member host. Multicast packets can be distributed as required by sending only multicast data to these ports.
For example, as shown in FIG. 1, a router 1 is connected to an aggregation switch 2, the aggregation switch 2 is connected to an access switch 3, and each access switch 3 is capable of being connected to multiple multicast group member hosts. Each switch is configured with a member port for being connected to a multicast group member host side and a router port for being connected to the router side. In addition, a multicast forwarding table is configured on a switch, and each forwarding entry of the multicast forwarding table stores information about a corresponding member port. In general, if no multicast protocol packet is received on a member port within a period of waiting time, it may be considered that a corresponding multicast group member host goes offline, and the switch needs to delete a forwarding entry corresponding to the member port from the multicast forwarding table. The time of waiting for a multicast protocol packet may be called port aging time, and the port aging time may be acquired according to a multicast protocol parameter configured on the switch. In addition, for the router, when the multicast group member host goes offline, the port aging time also needs to be acquired according to a multicast protocol parameter configured on the router.
However, multicast protocol parameters on a router and a switch in the prior art are preconfigured by a manufacturer, and for different manufacturers or different product models of a same manufacturer, the multicast protocol parameters configured on the router and the switch are also generally inconsistent. Therefore, on a same network, multicast protocol parameters configured on a router and a switch may be inconsistent, and such inconsistency may result in different port aging times for all devices, which affects use of the network by a user and degrades network performance.